AI that deletes people from photos makes rewriting history easy

PHOTOBOMBER begone. Artificial intelligence can remove objects from a picture by imagining how best to fill the gaps left behind.

The system, created by graphics hardware firm Nvidia, was trained on images of human faces, animals and landscapes, for example. As a result, it recognises content in photos that need retouching (arxiv.org/abs/1804.07723). “Honestly, I didn’t expect this to work so well,” says Bryan Catanzaro at Nvidia.

The technology may be of use to social media firms, keen to boost image and video sharing on their platforms. But it may also interest authoritarian regimes that want to remove out-of-favour people …

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